Daily Weather Trivia, Forecasts, and Information on all things weather

Archive

Hail

I know I haven’t been posting much lately, but I’ll be back at it in full swing now. Not much weather to talk about this week except for the “true” return of winter-like temperatures to much of the United States. Early this week, we saw a large and expansive storm develop in Colorado in a process called lee-cyclogenesis, a process in which low pressure develops in the lee of the Rocky Mountains and strengthens as it moves ENE into the Midwest and Northern Plains States. With that came some very heavy rain, and even severe weather for parts of the Southern and Central Plains, as storms erupted in a line along the eastward advancing cold front. Damaging winds and even hail were seen in places such as Minneapolis and even Chicago. Take a look at some of the pictures below.

The picture above is from North Minneapolis on November 10th. Some of the hail was up to quarter size.

Naperville, a suburb of Chicago, saw hail as well:

And a video as well:

Now, certainly, hail isn’t typically seen in November in places such as Naperville, or Minneapolis, but in this case, there was enough cold air aloft to form the hail and a very shallow layer of warm air at the surface in the form of a northward moving warm front. With that, storms broke out and small hail was seen in both locations on the 10th.

Behind this front, many places saw a temperature drop of over 50 degrees in just 24 hours!!! Now that’s a cold front!

Over the next few weeks, temperatures will, in fact, be warmer than normal, but don’t expect to see in temperatures in the 60s and 70s anytime soon in the upper Midwest. However, there does not appear to be any snowstorms looming for Thanksgiving week, but it is still over a week out, so I’ll be sure to keep you updated and let you know if that changes.